hion
on the high back of an arm-chair, "there's that five hundred pounds. You
can have that."

"What five hundred pounds?" asked Lionel.

"The five hundred that Uncle Stephen left me. I don't want it. Old West
gives me as much as keeps me in clothes and that, which is all I care
about. You take the money and use it."

"No, Jan. Thank you warmly, old boy, all the same; but I'd not take your
poor little bit of money if I were starving."

"What's the good of it to me?" persisted Jan, swaying his legs about. "I
can't use it: I have got nothing to use it in. I have put it in the bank
at Heartburg, but the bank may go smash, you know, and then who'd be the
better for the money? You take it and make sure of it, Lionel."

Lionel smiled at him. Jan was as simple and single-hearted in his way as
Lucy Tempest was in hers. But Lionel must want money very grievously
indeed, before he would have consented to take honest Jan's.

"I have five hundred of my own, you know, Jan," he said. "More than I
can use yet awhile."

So he fixed upon the Bar, and would have hastened to London but for Lady
Verner's illness. In the weak, low state to which disappointment and
irritability had reduced her, she could not bear to lose sight of
Lionel, or permit him to depart. "It will be time enough when I am dead;
and that won't be long first," was the constant burden of her song to
him.

He believed his mother to be little more likely to die than he was, but
he was too dutiful a son to cross her in her present state. He gathered
certain ponderous tomes about him, and began studying law on his own
account, shutting himself up in his room all day to do it. Awfully dry
work he found it; not in the least congenial; and many a time did he
long to pitch the whole lot into the pleasant rippling stream, running
through the grounds of Sir Rufus Hautley, which danced and glittered in
the sun in view of Lionel's window.

He could not remain at his daily study without interruptions. They were
pretty frequent. People--tenants, workmen, and others--would persist in
coming for orders to Mr. Lionel. In vain Lionel told them that he could
not give orders, could not interfere; that he had no longer anything to
do with Verner's Pride. They could not be brought to understand why he
was not their master as usual--at any rate, why he could not act as one,
and interpose between them and the tyrant, Roy. In point of fact, Mr.
Roy was head and master of the estate ju